


Dust on the Road

by ahimsabitches



Category: Oliver & Company (1988)
Genre: Angela is a friend's, Dianna is my OC, Gen, I needed to work this out of my system, hi we love gross old nasty men, there is death here, this is a grieving fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 16:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17165174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches





	Dust on the Road

The phone rang. The dobes raised their heads. They did so because the noise was unfamiliar; Bill’s old Bakelite rotary had finally croaked. Angela had bought him a newer, sleeker model that looked like something out of fucking Star Trek, with buttons backlit in alien green and a curved handset that she’d called “ergonomic”, whatever the fuck that meant.

Scifi bullshit or not, Bill had to admit the soft trill this one gave out didn’t slice into his brain and trigger headaches like the Bakelike’s warbling shriek. He let it ring a couple times while he lit a fresh cigar and inhaled the first earthy pull. On the exhale, he picked up. The reciever almost disappeared in his thick-fingered hands. “Sykes,” he said. 

“Hey, Bill,” a familiar female voice said with an unfamiliar hesitancy. 

Bill jerked reflexively, almost dropping his cigar. “ _Helen_? How the  _fuck’d_ you get this number?”

Wryly now, absent the uncertainty of before, his eldest sister said, “I run a collections agency, in case you forgot. Tracking people down’s our job.”

Bill sighed and ran his free hand through his close-cropped hair. “Okay. Right. What the hell’s so important you had to call me at work? You do have my home number, y'know.”

“I know. And I tried it. Yesterday. And last night. And this morning. Do you fucking live at work?”

He and Di had stopped by the diner to wait for Angela’s shift to end after they’d left the office, then all three of them had gone out with some Salernos to celebrate… maybe a birthday? It didn’t matter. Several weeks ago Di’s cousin Romeo had thrown a party to celebrate getting his wisdom teeth out. “ _Party hard, hustle harder_ ” should have been, if Bill’s opinion fucking mattered, the Salerno words.

“No, I just went out last night. Stayed out late.” He took a pull from the cigar and tapped the ashes out on the glass tray beside the phone.

“I tried to call you three times before nine am your time. You can’t tell me you and both of your… girlfriends slept through that.”

Bill pinched his temples and sighed, blowing twin clouds of smoke out his nostrils. “Could you just once try to talk about Ange and Di without sounding like an eighty-year-old nun with a ninety-year-old stick up her ass?”

“Bill, Jesus Christ, I called to tell you Mom died yesterday morning.”

Everything in him slammed to a stop. “Wh…what?”

Helen sighed heavily. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Bill, I… Christ, I fucked that up. She… Mom died early yesterday morning. Sophia was with her and noticed the right side of her face was drooping so she took her to…”

Slowly, Helen’s words lost their shape. His lips lost the feeling of the cigar. The dim industrial walls of his office and the warehouse beyond melted into a fuzzy greyblueness that was once oppressively close and terrifyingly  _gone_.

Gone? No, she couldn’t be.  

Bill’s chest began to burn. _Oh god it’s contagious I’m having a heart attack oh fuck_  but there was a lizard that lived at the bottom of his brain and that lizard pulled the little trigger at the top of his spine and then his lungs suddenly inflated and the burning went away. Some of the greyness peeled back like morning fog.

“…fell asleep before we could even set up the bed, and she just… didn’t wake up.”

Mom? Gone? It didn’t make sense. He’d just talked to her last  _week_. About which color of fucking  _carpet_ to put down in the house.

“Bill?”

It didn’t make sense. Not what Helen was trying to tell him, and not the meek, subdued waver in her normal tobacco-roughened drill sergeant drawl. 

“Bill, are you there?”

“Yeah,” he wheezed, his own voice barely above a whisper. 

Helen sighed again, the sound somehow carrying the weight of grief through the phone and depositing it in little motes in his ear. “Soph and Pam are already there. Terri’s on her way. I’ve got a flight out tonight. Barb’s in LA for a conference, but she’ll fly in hopefully sometime Thursday. I’d…I’d like you there too. Pam can sit on my shoehorn and spin. No, yours. It’s bigger.”

_But I just fucking talked to her last week. We argued about fucking carpet. I just talked to her last week._

“Y…yeah, okay,” Bill said, full of humming numbness. His mouth and the sounds and his ears and his mind had been slowly drifting away from each other, and now he echoed through lightyears of himself.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Helen murmured, her voice on the edge of breaking.

“Yeah,” Bill said, knowing that when he was done drifting, when the fog around him lifted, when the numbness wore off, it would hurt. He could feel it like a great black beast prowling at the edge of the fogbank.

Bill listened to Helen clear her throat and swallow her tears. “Call me after you figure out your flight, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Hey. I love you, Bill, okay? I know I don’t say it much… hardly at all, really, but I do. We all do.”

“Yeah. Love you too, Helen.”

He let the phone slip from his grip, uncaring whether it landed in its sleek futuristic cradle, and sat with his cigar loosely resting between his left pointer and middle fingers.

His office door opened, and the Dobes scrambled up, claws clicking across the wooden floor, to greet Dianna. 

“Ey ey, boys, fuckoffame! This ain’t for you. Boss, they were outta chicken parm but chicken parm’s shitty anyway so I got us a brisket an’ a shitload a’ garlic knots…hey, Boss, you okay?”

Bill heard the plastic bags in Dianna’s hands rustle; felt their impact on his desk as she put them down. Smelled the warm, safe smells of bread and garlic, of Dianna’s fresh coffee. He sensed these things through the last fading vestiges of the fog, and thus were as unreal, as  _gone_ as his mother’s wish for white carpet.

“Boss? Hey, you in there? Boss?” Dianna’s voice, brazen and heavily layered with the place and the people to which she belonged, drew close and urgent. “Boss?  _Bill_!” She snapped her fingers inches from his nose. Instinctively, he blinked and jerked back. 

“Jesus fuckin Christ, don’t scare me like that. I thought you were havin’ a stroke.”

Bill glanced at Dianna. Her dark eyes were wide and worried. “No, not…not me,” he said. 

Dianna’s expression tensed from worry to alarm. “Huh? Boss, y’ don’t sound like yerself at all. You’re pale as shit. Maybe we should call a doc–”

Dianna reached across the desk for the phone. But there was still some of Helen’s grief in there, caught in the little holes, dusted in the earpiece. If Dianna picked up the phone, it would all spill out, the reality of what Helen had said– not Mom I just talked to her last week about carpet– and chase away the fog. Bill snatched Dianna’s wrist in his mitted hand and held it. He caught the reflexive flash of fury that crossed Dianna’s face like a cloud shadow.

“I’m not having a stroke,” he rasped, gazing limply at her wrist in his grip. “My mother did. She died.”

Dianna’s thick black eyebrows vaulted up toward her hairline and her mouth dropped into an O of shock. “Oh god. Oh  _fuck_.” In another reflex, she crossed herself with the hand that Bill didn’t grip. He let go of her. “When? Just now?”

“Yesterday morning.”

Dianna sucked in a breath, and on the exhale, her entire being sagged. After a time, she said, “You’re about ta burn y'fingers.”

Bill didn’t understand the words at first. He looked at her blankly. She pointed to the hand that had not grabbed her wrist. A thick, feathery line of ashes lay on the desk, as if arrowing accusingly to the truncated nub of cigar that rested between his fingers. Bill blinked. No, that cigar was new. He’d only taken two puffs. 

How long had he been sitting there?

Dianna must have seen the helpless confusion on his face, because she began unhooking the docker’s clutch from her shoulders. It and the two pistols in it landed on his desk with a heavy metallic thud. With numb disinterest, Bill watched her unkit, which, at first, had been an amusingly long and involved process. She pulled off the gunbelt around her waist next, pulled out a switchblade from one hip pocket, a curved hunter’s knife from the other, and the butterfly from her right boot. Finally, she reached into her cleavage and dug out a tiny snubnosed .22 from a pocket sewn into her bra. This done, she placed the .22 on the desk within reach, unzipped the black flak vest she always wore and let it drop to the floor.

Disarmed and unarmored, she crossed the short distance between them in one step and looped her arms around Bill’s neck.

“Dianna at work without her guns. I think I just saw a pig fly,” he wanted to say. 

Instead, he made a strangled grunt in the back of his throat, drew his arms around her strong waist and buried his face in the hollow of her shoulder.   
The grip of her arms, tight and warm and immediate, burned the fog away. The first breath of her sweetly familiar scent returned all his floating parts to himself, to his ass in his leather chair, to the smell of lunch congealing in plastic bags, to the wasted cigar and its corpse of ashes on his desk, to the dusty, greasy residue of grief Helen had left in his sleek new phone, which had sent its ugly spores into his brain.

And oh  _god_ , it still didn’t make any sense, how much she’d wanted that white carpet. Someone who was willing to get into a yelling match over fucking carpet wasn’t someone that just fucking died out of  _nowhere_. Not someone with that much sheer, dogged, sinewy will. 

Not Momma.

Oh, not  _Momma_.

The sob hurled itself out of him so violently his body spasmed, but Dianna’s grip did not falter. He sobbed again, unable to help himself, unable to help the great and terrible well of grief from opening up its charybdic maw right below his heart.  
Bill didn’t know how long they remained that way, but at some point Dianna had swung a leg over his knees and sat on his lap, a position they’d used in better times for much more pleasurable ends. Dianna pressed a gentle hand to the back of Bill’s head and kissed his temple and said nothing. Bill burrowed his face deeper into her chest, a gesture he’d used in happier times for much lewder ends. He wet the front of her simple black t-shirt with tears that felt like liquid lead. He gripped her tight, his muscles thrumming like power lines, grief roiling through his entire body in heavy black waves. Dianna’s lips on his forehead and temples and her hands in his hair and on his back and the soft vibrations in her throat against his cheek as she whispered to him in Italian and the warm, steady, living thereness of her kept him from utterly shattering apart. 

After a time, the wracking sobs lessened. Dianna kissed his forehead and said nothing. 

After another time, Sykes took a hitching breath and wiped the last of his tears on Dianna’s tits.

“Want I should call Ange?” Dianna asked softly. “She’s better at this emotion stuff than I am anyway.”

Bill tightened his grip on her ribs. She wheezed. He didn’t let up. “In a minute.”

Dianna nodded against his cheek, gave his thick neck a squeeze, and said nothing.

Angela was better at handling emotions than either of them; that was the truth. But right at this moment, Bill wanted Dianna. Because Dianna understood, in a way that none of his other women had, that no matter how long you dance on death’s backbone and how good you get at deluding yourself that the tightrope of bones you’re walking is a fucking highway, sooner or later you’re going to fucking fall on one side or the other. 

Bill had heard–or read, somewhere– that killing a person causes some sort of quantum shift in your molecules or brain chemistry or some pseudosciency horseshit like that. They were right, but they weren’t looking at the whole picture.  

Bill’s father had died as he’d lived: drunk and sloppy. Bill had been a year away from primary school yet, but he was old enough to know the mean red look in his father’s eyes meant someone was about to get hurt. And when his father’s red eyes started to turn yellow, he knew with the factless, intuitive certainty of a child that something inside him had gone wrong and could only get wronger very quickly.

And it did. A month later, Charles Sykes’ secondborn Pamela had found him in the barn out back, facedown in a pool of his own bloody vomit next to a bathtub full of rotgut moonshine.

Bill had not pulled any kind of trigger on his father– the cirrhosis and stomach cancer had done that– but with the bitter awareness of a child without the mechanisms of self-deception that adults are so adept at cultivating, he’d felt something deep and tectonic within him shift. If he were very still and quiet, he could stand by the verge on the way to school and watch two hidden roads roll out from his heart: one down which he’d been told he’d go, a sunny one with mile markers and waystations that sold tall, cold root beer floats, his friends laughing and shooting pinecones at each other with their slingshots, things like school, a job, a house, a dog, a family…all the things his mother told him he would get if he were a good boy, listened to his mother, did his homework, minded his teachers, and was nice to his sisters.

The other road had mile markers and friends and school and root beer floats, but six-year-old Bill couldn’t see it to the end. Briars stretched their wicked fingers into the road, and every few steps the road jerked into a bend or twisted up a hill like a broken spine, and tortured, winding trails led off it like scoliotic ribs into dim, baleful woods.

With the helpless, resigned acceptance of a child without the skills of self-delusion upon which adults build their lives, he knew his feet would turn down this road, no matter how often he tried to jump the ditch to the other. 

And it was not, he’d realized in increments over time, solely his father’s fault. Nor was death the only circumstance by which the road grew torturous and dark. Suze had joined him on the road, and it had changed. It had changed again when Bill Junior had joined them both, and changed again when Suze had taken Junior away. 

Life shifted like a scratch in a record or a glitch in a film reel because it was made up of moments that depended on every other moment, and there was no cosmic or mythical glue strong enough to hold them together in any coherent way for very long. So sure, killing a person changed you. So did people dying around you. So did loving someone that would die. So did making a person, and knowing that you’d put them on earth to grow old and, one day, die too.

What young Bill had seen as a dark, broken road those many years ago was the revelation that death was contained in the human condition; that death was stupid and senseless and without reason or clarity, just like life was, and the best anybody could do was to understand this and stop trying to run toward the one or the other. You’d meet both soon anyway. 

He had. Dianna had too. They’d both dealt death with their hands and their hearts. They’d witnessed their own deaths in the nightdark eyes of their almost-killers. They’d watched their roads buckle and twist and darken as the people beside whom they’d walked stain it with their blood.

Because she knew that death was a fucking farce and so, therefore, was life, she knew, consciously or not, that the only thing you could really do as the road heaved and surged under you was to hold tight to those with you steady enough to keep their feet. And the grip, strong and sure, was enough. It was  _I love you_ ; it was _I’m sorry._  It was  _I’m with you_ ; it was  _I won’t leave you_. It was both acceptance and rejection of the idiot furor of life, and the reason why he– they– persisted despite life’s broken marriage to death. 

Bill filled his lungs to capacity, sucking in Dianna’s scent (perfumed by gun oil and garlic), and let out a breath smogged with dead cigar smoke and sour, metallic grief. Dianna kissed his temple.

“What time is it?” He asked Dianna’s collarbone.

She lifted her left arm from his back. “Quarter till two.”

Shit. Ange would just be starting her shift at the diner.

“Y'hungry? Food’s cold, but I could nuke it.”

“No.”

“Want me to call Ange now?”

He did. He wanted to hug her now, to feel her and smell her, to hold her, to hold both of them and let them hold him. To feel their steadiness before he had to think about arranging a fucking plane to Bumfuck, Wisconsin and dealing with Pam and oh christ his mother had named him executor of her will and that one’d be fun to explain to Helen and…

“Yeah,” he grunted, fresh tears fracturing the word.

Dianna let go of him and he loosened his arms enough for her to twist around, reach the phone, and dial the number to the diner. Bill wondered if she’d feel the little drifts of sadness Helen had deposited in the earpiece, if they’d tickle as they went in Dianna’s ear.

Bill could hear the line ring, then click, then a voice on the other end. He couldn’t pick out the words, but it wasn’t Ange. 

“Hey, Sarah, this is Dianna Salerno. Is Angela available?”

The voice purred. Dianna cocked a half-smile. “If y'don’t mind I’ll stay on the line till she gets done verbally abusin’ her customer. It’s kinda important.”

While they waited, Dianna idly adjusted and smoothed his tie, occasionally meeting his eyes. The communication was instant and subconscious:  _I’ve got you. We’re in this together_.

A new voice purred into the receiver. Bill could pick out Angela’s voice from across the goddamn world by now, and his heart gave a little jump. “Hey, Ange,” Dianna said, the same muted softness in her voice as had been in Helen’s. “Listen, uh. I hate to–” Angela’s voice picked up volume and speed. “No, no, he’s fine, relax. Yeah, I’m with him now. I was callin’ t'say we just found out his mother died. Yesterday.” Dianna looked at him. “Yeah. Whenever ya can. Did ya drive or d'ya need me t’ come pick ya up?” She smoothed down his collar, which needed no smoothing. “Okay. Nah, we’re at the office. Thanks, Ange. Oh, don’t fuckin’ speed. The cops’ve still got that speed trap up by Hartway Road.”

The line clicked and Dianna twisted around again to replace the receiver. “She’ll speed,” she said. Bill nodded. 


End file.
